


As You Wish

by Sakon76



Category: Princess Bride (1987), Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 00:48:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17478113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sakon76/pseuds/Sakon76
Summary: Once upon a time, a farmboy loved a golden-haired princess....





	As You Wish

**As You Wish**  
by K. Stonham  
first released June 9th, 2017

There is a story that goes like this: once there was a princess and a pirate.

That's not where the story begins, of course, nor is it where it ends. But that's neither here nor there.

The story goes: he wasn't a pirate when she met him. He was a farmboy, poor but perfect. And she wasn't a princess, not then. But her people had been brought forth from the sea to teach men how to love, and that being so, how could she herself help but love? As I said, he was poor but perfect.

But sometimes perfect isn't enough, and he set forth to make his fortune, to vanquish the spectre of poverty and make a good life for them both. She would have had him anyway, but men have their pride.

All things have their pride.

The farmboy was lost at sea, and her heart was lost with him.

She kept the love-name he had given her, Buttercup for the golden hue of her hair, and life continued on. She tried to teach others to love.

Some would not be taught.

Princes are proud, and not perfect.

But then her farmboy returned, no longer innocent, but a pirate of reknown.

She would have died for him.

But the thing is this: the sea is eternal and so are those beings created of its blood.

Men, not so.

It could have happened a hundred ways: a battle, illness, poison, old age... each would have been their own cruelty.

In the end, it was an accident, and her Westley died as she grasped him to her, pleading to absent gods for their mercy.

She buried him, and buried her love-name with him. And time marched on, and things happened.

(That phrase covers so much: "things happened.")

And when her sisters rose up from the shackles of slavery, Antiope was among them, and fought fiercer than any other.

They retreated to the island Zeus created for them, bringing along those mortal women they had freed. Some were friends, some lovers. Some brought their daughters. Some were pregnant. A few were those born in the wrong bodies. But they were all of the race of men, and so they too passed within a century. But they were not forgotten by those who loved them: the graves in Themiscyra's cemetery never lack for visitors, or fresh tokens.

There is only one child on the island, and everyone knows who she is, and what she is.

But still, a child...! So precious to them.

Antiope trains herself ever harder, making an unrivaled warrior out of the woman the pirate had loved. She wonders sometimes what he would make of her now. She has not abstained from living and loving in his absence. And despite his telling her that death could not stop true love, only delay it, she sometimes thinks she is not the same person he loved.

(Only sometimes. Other times she knows she still is.)

So she trains. And eventually she trains the child, daughter of her sister.

And one day the solitude of Themiscyra is broken by men with weapons she has never before seen.

Antiope fights. And if she sees from the corner of her eye that her niece stands with a man....

In the end, she doesn't have time to say all of the things she wants to say. Or even any of them. She wants to tell Diana that life is pain. That she will lose this man. To time, to illness or accident, or war....

All she can do is hope that she has trained her, trained this miraculous godchild well enough.

And then the world is gone from Antiope.

She turns, knowing her grave will never lack for visitors or fresh tokens.

And there before her, waiting, is a pair of eyes like the sea after a storm.

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously inspired by Robin Wright playing both Buttercup in 1987 and Antiope thirty years later. ^_^


End file.
